Biosphere Earth — 9: Identity
The cultural value of wildernesses, wildlife, and wild ecosystems typically plays only with Indigenous People. Developed-world peoples like me tend to find very little cultural identification in Nature. Nature is a place to visit when taking a break from “The Great Indoors.”
But if Nature (aka. Biosphere Earth) is what created us, and is our only life-support system, and if we are causing its collapse, now, then… What about the next era?
From a biospheric perspective, we need to be building now what will sustain the next era of life; what will make the next era as good and bright as it can possibly be.
Our first, big, societal question today should be how good can we make it? Society should be saying, “How good can we make the future?”
This era of self-destructive economics is coming to an end. We can address that by bridging our way into a brighter, more wild-planet future or we can see what happens.
Biospheric Reality
This is what biospheric reality looks like, the Global Cycle of Cycles.
I think the main thing i just want to share… Watch the movements:
This NASA animation shows 20 years of seasonal change, compressed into a loop. Look at the center of the map, specifically South America, then Central Africa, then Equatorial Asia.
Notice the center of the map is green year-round, these are forests and grasslands. Up in the USA though, the green comes and goes. Ice descends in the winter; green returns in the Spring. These seasonal changes show variations in biospheric productivity.
Since it’s warm and wet at the equator its forests and grasslands —indeed, the Tropics as an overall system, are productive “year-round” compared to mid-lattitude (USA & Europe, etc.) and high-lattitude (Greenland, Russia, etc.) regions, which experience cold.
That makes Tropical forest-, grassland-, and aquatic- wildernesses the most effective asset on Earth for continuous atmospheric carbon reduction, biospheric service delivery, and overall biospheric stabilization. More about the carbon reduction benefits in a future blog (next week).
These systems — the Tropics, are vital organ ecosystems. Other vital organ systems (high-productivity ecosystems) include all of Earth’s coastal areas, a few lakes, and the high-latitude oceans.
These systems comprise the biological core of our planet. And by waking-up and becoming Stewards of this grand, planetary, biospheric process, the Cycle of Cycles that is our life-support system, we claim ownership over our existence and, i think, set the stage for advancing humanity.
More tomorrow! Thanks
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Citations
- Links in the article above. Check out my paper, The Systemic Climate Solution for more on the power of the Tropics, and this draft of my upcoming paper, Earth’s Biosphere = all GDPs + all Lives, for more science on our life-support system.
This blog is part of a series on Biosphere Earth.
Read the previous blog: Honoring Indigenous People.
To review other posts in this series, visit the TOC.
